WHAT HAPPENED before the big bang? Try asking a cosmologist this and they'll usually fob you off by saying it's a meaningless question. Stephen Hawking famously likened it to asking "What's north of the North Pole?" The big bang, the idea goes, was the ultimate beginning. Time and space came into being then. There was no "before".
But that may not be true after all. One daring physicist has come up with an answer to the question no one is supposed to ask. If he is right, the Universe began an unimaginably long time before the big bang. "Far from being the beginning of time, the big bang was merely an important turning point in the Universe's history," says Gabriele Veneziano of CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics near Geneva.
Veneziano's quest for the era before the big bang started in the early 1990s, when he and his colleague ...
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